The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The City of Flin Flon has no intention of undergoing an external audit to help the cash-strapped municipality get a tighter grip on expenses. That's despite a suggestion from a concerned taxpayer that an audit is both common and necessary to weed out needless costs. 'Most often, when an entity is short of dollars, one of the things that they do is, they have an audit done of their operations,' Dennis Hydamaka told council at their regular meeting last week. Hydamaka said the audit could be performed by an outside entity and begin 'right here in City Hall and (go) right through to see where, and if, there is a considerable amount of waste.' But Chief Administrative Officer Mark Kolt said no plans for an external audit exist. 'Significant price' He said an analysis that covers the 'very large number of things that we're responsible for' would come at a 'significant price' likely exceeding $50,000. Coun. Colleen McKee, chair of the Finance Committee, said the committee is not qualified to conduct an audit but has 'started looking at operations' to find savings. 'We met with each of the department heads and we started looking individually at each department as to how we could...run things a little more efficiently,' she said. In one area where council has scaled back _ cancelling this year's door-to-door spring clean-up campaign _ Hydamaka was critical. He also opposed what he described as neglect involving an above-ground sewer box, which doubles as a walkway, on Hapnot Street. Hydamaka, who lives nearby, said the sewer box in front of a few homes is 'saturated with human waste' and is rotting and falling apart. He said city workers have been to the site multiple times over the last two years but have patched the problem rather than fixing it. Coun. Bill Hanson said the city has an annual program to replace sewer boxes, but its funding is limited. 'It's the old story: that which breaks gets fixed first,' he said, describing how projects are chosen. Coun. McKee assured Hydamaka that his concerns would be looked at but 'at this point we can't make any commitment because the last time I checked, nothing from nothing is nothing.' 'So we have to find out ways to stabilize our tax base first of all,' she said. 'Then we have to look at ways on how we're going to garner revenue for the city. Then at that point we're going to have to look at how we're going to deal with these (problems).' Kolt said Hydamaka's opposition to the spring clean-up cancellation illustrates the bind in which the city finds itself. '...no matter what it is that we cut, somebody's going to be affected and somebody is going to feel that the wrong thing was cut,' he said. But Hydamaka said the problems with the sewer box have been ongoing and predate the city's recent cash crunch.
